FEATURES ARCHIVE

Climage change is perhaps the biggest issue yet to face the human race. While it is hard for our generation to see this in any other terms than ‘warming’, it is only relatively recently that generations of people across the world faced what must have seemed like the exact opposite. In Northern Europe, dramatic declines in temperatures occurred at intervals spanning a period of several hundred years, from the 16th to the mid 19th centuries. Winters were punishing and long, causing much hardship. But in the frozen soil of this hardship, the seeds of a new art grew up and flourished in the hands of Dutch and Flemish masters who captured the extraordinary beauty of the landscape; a novel and captivating backdrop to the story of people both at work and at play.

The beginning of Art’s little Ice Age in Holland is synonymous with Hendrik Avercamp whose intense and vibrant masterpiece Winter landscape with iceskaters, painted in 1608, emerges in response to the very cold winter of that year. Avercamp fathered a tradition that grew throughout the 17th century into a major genre; that can rightly be said to belong especially to Dutch painting. It is a tradition which, like the weather, extended across the centuries, and found new life in hands of 19th-century painter and leading exponent of the Dutch Romantic School, Andreaus Schelfhout. Poetically, the inspiration that the Romantics sought in the art of their 17th century forebears coincided with the return of cold winters once more to Europe; fortuitous conditions that were not to last beyond the middle of the century, but that saw Schelfhout rise to become perhaps the last great master of the evocative winter landscape.